It’s All Your Fault

Dalrymple’s new essay at The New English Review is notable for two major reasons: it is probably the most personal essay he has ever written, and it includes what might be his most sweeping summary of modern times:

Now it is my belief, in part deriving from attending to the motions of my own mind, that resentment is pre-eminently the emotion or mode of feeling and thought of our time. When the social historians of the future, if there are any, come to characterise our era they will not call it the age of the atomic bomb, or the financial derivative age, or even that of the 100 per cent mortgage, they will call it the Age of Resentment. For everyone is on the qui vive for the supposed causes of his victim status that are deep-seated, beyond not only his control but beyond repair, at least without a total revolution in human affairs.